YAOUNDÉ, Cameroon – In Cameroon’s North West region where conflict has been raging for about eight years now, a leading Catholic prelate has called on Catholic teachers to be “vectors of peace.”
Archbishop Andrew Nkea Fuanya of the Bamenda archdiocese was speaking July 20 during the annual celebration of Teachers’ Day.
“The vocation you have answered to be teachers is a very noble one. It is a profession that has dignity,” said the archbishop, who also serves as the President of the National Episcopal Conference of Cameroon.
He was speaking to Catholic teachers during a homily at St. Joseph Cathedral of Bamenda Archdiocese.
“The dignity of this vocation lies in the fact that you take responsibility to do what God does; impart knowledge to others and we know that God, who has called you, will not abandon you,” Fuanya said.
He said in Cameroon’s war-ravaged regions, God will continue to protect teachers,” especially from the violence that we have in our society.”
For nearly a decade, separatists in Cameroon’s North West and South West regions had made a school boycott a cornerstone of their struggle.
Teachers have often come under attack, schools have been burned, and students kidnapped or killed.
Of the 6,970 schools in the North West and South West regions, 2,875 (41 percent) were reported to be non-functional, according to a January 2024 report by Cameroon Education Cluster. The report says, up to 54 percent of schools in the two regions weren’t functional in the 2021/2022 school year.
It also said that 246.354 students had been affected by school closures as of September 2023.
The gory details of attacks on schools as the conflict continues to unfold is what makes Nkea push for peace to become an integral part of teacher’s duty in the classroom, because it could lay the foundations for a sustainable peace in future.
Accounts of such attacks are numerous, but a few examples may suffice.
On September 26, 2023, gunmen stormed a Catholic school in the parish of St Martin de Tours in Kembong in the South West region.
They shot at a priest and teachers, justifying their action by saying that they didn’t want the school to operate in the region.
In Boyo, in the North West region, non-state armed separatist fighters invaded Government Bilingual High School, Fundong on September 7, 2022, setting the structures ablaze.
The following day, September 8, 2022, over a dozen school children were kidnapped on their way to school and taken to an unknown destination by armed men
On February 16, 2019, the Catholic Church was forced to shut down one of its largest schools – the St Augustine Catholic College Nso, after gunmen kidnapped as many as 170 students, along with some staff members, although they were subsequently released.
In the early hours of February 9, 2021, suspected separatists set a section of the Catholic school in Kungi village in Nkambe – in the North West Region – ablaze and the fire consumed an entire block of classrooms.
The separatist crisis started in 2016 when lawyers in Cameroon’s English–speaking regions, later joined by teachers, took to the streets to protest what they considered was the undue influence of French in Anglo-Saxon schools and courts.
But what was initially a peaceful protest turned violent when French-speaking majority government forces took a hardline position. The protests then took a more political turn, with large sections of the Anglophone Cameroonians highlighting their decades of marginalization. The political agitations gave birth to a separatist fringe, who are now fighting to sever the two Anglophone regions from the rest of the country and to create a separate nation to be called Ambazonia.
Nkea says he now believes lasting peace is only possible if a new breed of Cameroonians embraces peace at very tender ages.
“That is why I ask all of you to be pro-peace and to hand over a culture of peace to the children whom you teach,” the archbishop said.
“You are transmitters of knowledge and therefore transmitters of truth. You are not going to give your own ideas or what you think. You are going to transmit what is true,” he added.
He also urged Catholic teachers to transmit to the young minds “the doctrine of our Church because our schools remain agents of evangelization.”
“You are transmitters of the moral values of the Church which are summarized in the 10 Commandments,” the archbishop said.
“Be teachers with dignity,” the archbishop added, and urged them to inspire others to hunger to be Catholic teachers.
“Let the poverty you have known only to your pockets. The more you thank God for what he has done, the more God multiplies what you are. The value of what you do can never ever be quantified or calculated in monetary terms,” he said.
In comments to Crux, Nkea said education remains “a fundamental right of every child.”
“Education is the cornerstone of our nation’s future. It is essential for the well-being and prosperity of families. Therefore, it is crucial that classes continue,” Nkea said.
